Philippines earthquake kills 69 as rescuers search collapsed houses amid aftershocks
The Philippine government is considering seeking help from foreign governments based on an ongoing rapid damage assessment.
Rescuers used backhoes and sniffer dogs to look for survivors in collapsed houses and other damaged buildings in the central Philippines on Wednesday, a day after an earthquake killed at least 69 people.
The death toll was expected to rise from the magnitude-6.9 earthquake that hit at about 10 pm Tuesday and trapped an unspecified number of residents in the hard-hit city of Bogo and outlying rural towns in Cebu province.
Sporadic rain and damaged bridges and roads have hampered the race to save lives, officials said.
“We’re still in the golden hour of our search and rescue,” Office of Civil Defence deputy administrator Bernardo Rafaelito Alejandro IV said in a news briefing. “There are still many reports of people who were pinned or hit by debris.”
The epicentre of the earthquake, which was set off by movement in an undersea fault line at a dangerously shallow depth of 5 kilometres (3 miles), was about 19 kilometres (12 miles) northeast of Bogo, a coastal city of about 90,000 people in Cebu province, where about half of the deaths were reported, officials said.
The Philippine government is considering seeking help from foreign governments based on an ongoing rapid damage assessment, Alejandro said.
The United States, Japan, Australia and the European Union expressed condolences.
“We stand ready to support the Philippine government's response as friends, partners, allies,” MaryKay Carlson, U.S. ambassador to the Philippines, said in a post on social media platform X.
Workers were trying to transport a backhoe to hasten search and rescue efforts in a cluster of shanties in a mountain village hit by a landslide and boulders, Bogo city disaster-mitigation officer Rex Ygot told The Associated Press early Wednesday.
“It’s hard to move in the area because there are hazards,” said Glenn Ursal, another disaster-mitigation officer, who added that some survivors were brought to a hospital from the mountain village.
Deaths also were reported from the outlying towns of Medellin and San Remigio, where three coast guard personnel, a firefighter and a child were killed separately by collapsing walls and falling debris while trying to flee to safety from a basketball game in a sports complex that was disrupted by the quake, town officials said.
The earthquake was one of the most powerful to strike the central region in more than a decade, and it occurred while many people were asleep or at home.
The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology issued a brief tsunami warning, advising people to stay away from the coastlines of Cebu and the nearby provinces of Leyte and Biliran due to possible waves of up to 1 meter (3 feet) in height.
No such waves were reported, and the tsunami warning was lifted more than three hours later. However, thousands of traumatised residents refused to return home and chose to stay in open grassy fields and parks overnight, despite intermittent rains.
Cebu and other provinces were still recovering from a tropical storm that battered the central region on Friday, leaving at least 27 people dead, mostly due to drownings and falling trees, knocking out power in entire cities and towns and forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.
Schools and government offices were closed in the quake-hit cities and towns while the safety of buildings was checked. More than 600 aftershocks have been detected after Tuesday night’s temblor, according to Teresito Bacolcol, director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology.
Rain-soaked mountainsides were more susceptible to land- and mudslides in a major earthquake, he warned.
“This was really traumatic to people. They’ve been lashed by a storm and then jolted by an earthquake,” Bacolcol said. “I don’t want to experience what they’ve gone through.”
The Philippines, one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries, is frequently affected by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions due to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of seismic faults that encircles the ocean. The archipelago is also lashed by about 20 typhoons and storms each year.
